Posts Tagged ‘brewday’

NZ Sour Wheat – This is the start of my brewday on Sunday, but its still Wednesday!
I have just mashed 2.45kg of Pale malt in my old mini-mash Tun, 66°c for 60mins, then added about 2-3L of cold water to bring the temp down to 49°c with another 1kg of pale malt added to the mash to add some Lactobacillus to the Mash. I have put my little mash tun into my FV fridge set at 46°c and i hope to keep the temperature above 35°c as it says here http://beerandwinejournal.com/fossil-cove-sour-mash-experiment/ I did as it states and I covered the mash with cling-film and topped it off with a blanket of co2.

I’m expecting a fair few spec-changes, I’m thinking of my combined Run-off / sparge to be no more than 30L, I may get more, I may boil down, I will no doubt have a gravity change which will also effect the bitterness….

**Sunday**
To start off with I prepared my malts while the HLT was heating:
Then Checked the Sour Mash, it was 33°c in the center and smelled like the waste malt skip at work, I’m pretty pleased it managed to stay at 33c as @lugsy51 tells me that should be alright:
The top of the mash, even though it was covered in Cling-film had changed to a darker shade than the rest of the mash underneath:
I added about 3.8L boiling water to the Sour mash and gave it a good stir before running off about 7L into the copper, these are the weirdest first runnings I’ve ever had, the photo below shows them as clear as they were going to get:
The copper was pretty full after the main mash was sparged with about 32L in total, I liquored back 3L as the boil progressed checking with my Refractometer:
I did a 10min & Flamout (90°c Steep) additions, I’m hoping the Pacific Jade will give some Orange notes which i think will compliment the Wheat beer yeast:
I liquored back 3L to 1048, 2 points above my original predicted OG:

I tasted the Sour wort after it had 15mins of boiling, it was very sour (like so sour I went to spit in the sink!), I boiled it down to 5L with the hope of driving off some of the smell…! Things calmed down after today’s main mash was run to the copper with the wort ending up with just a subtle tang behind the malt sweetness at the end of boil, I’m told the sour will increase as the wort ferments and the sugars are used up.
Yeast was rehydrated and pitched into 30L at 20°c.

Things went very smoothly even with extended boil times running off the small sour mash worked well while the main mash was having its mash rest then the rest of the brewday was as per usual with just a slight lingering smell of the sour mash in the house, I was expecting worse! :)
Fingers crossed on this one as its all new to me!

*27th Sep ’13 – Gravity at 1018 and looks to have finished, have given it a rouse and will check again tomorrow, at this rate the beer will be really balanced against the lactic sourness.

*28th Sep ’13 – FG seems steady and I’ve just dry hopped this with 22g Motueka I had in the freezer.

*Bottled 5th Sep ’13 – Primed about 24L with 165g White Sugar, its got a permanent haze and tastes like cheap orange juice, though the balance of sweet to sour is quite good, hopefully it will carbonate up well and give it a crispness. With its starting and finishing gravities this beer is actually 3.9% ABV.

*16th Oct ’13 – Taster time… Yeasty Clove on the nose, quite light sparkling body on the pallet with a tang like fresh squeezed oranges. I’m hungry and this is making my belly rumble, bitterness is subtle and quite chalky but its hard to detect as the sourness and prickly carbonation cross the tongue first, with a few more mouthfuls the body feels to have a slick quality like a good Belgian Wit.

SCAN (Summer, Citra, Amarillo & Nelson Sauvin) I’ve not brewed since the 18th of May due to being busy with a lean-to construction on the house so this is a quick crowd pleaser, nothing too strong or too bitter but bags of flavour.

I’ll try not leave it as long before I brew again, Sorry about that if you are a regular reader ;-) Thats 85 non-homebrewing days!

The Malts, I added a rough 1 Tsp Calcium Chloride to the mash:
First Wort Summer Hops:
A nice healthy Flame-out steep:
FV and bits had some extra love today, a nice soak with a chlorine based cleaner-sanitiser, good rinse then a final StarSan:
1042.5, liquored back to 1040:

All went fine apart from the PSU on my solar pump decided to pack in so swapped for spare pump/psu so i could stir my HLT. The ground water is pretty warm at the moment so cooling took an age and I gave up at 21°c before liquoring back and pitching the yeast.

It was last June during our wedding anniversary week in Whitby that me and Emma paid Matt a visit in his new Brewery, less than a year later Matt was coming up to his 100th brewed Gyle and had plans for brewing that beer the day I was there. He was not working full time last year, but now having stopped working for The Lions Den and taken on his first employee, he is out on his own.
Best laid plans! The day before our brewday a fused spur had blown and Matt had to cancel a brew doe to lack of hot liquor, so our brewday was Gyle #99 though I suppose in spirit it was still #100, it was to be a big 7%+ IPA hopped with recently released Mandarina Bavaria Hops from Germany.

I was on holiday, it felt wrong getting up this early but I got to Truefitt for 7.30am and found Matt had just started mashing in:
Run-off starts from the Mash Tun via the converted Keg Underback:
He said he was attaching the hop filter!:
The Copper Stand, this is where the last or late hops get to steep in the hot wort giving them time for the hop oils and flavours to infuse into the wort:
He aerates the wort via a sprayball while transferring to the fermenting vessel:
Matt is currently contract brewing for the one for the last breweries he worked at so was going some back-fills for us at Saltaire:
The Beer was named ‘Trembler’ after a previous and differently hopped brew of the same strength, its 7.4% and a Double IPA… I’m hoping to get my hands on some of this in bottle so I can add some tasting notes to the blog.

I had a good day with Matt and his new apprentice Jack, I hope to see Matt down at Saltaire sometime.
The last thing to note is that a Sausage & Tomato butty in Middlesbrough is at least 40p cheaper than in Shipley!!

Brown Ceas – This is my NCB / Saltaire Brewery brew for the bar, an American Style Brown Ale, loosely based on my previous ‘Steaming, Brown & Sticky‘ of last year, this is going to be a little lighter in colour as the other version was almost black, or at least a very dark brown.
‘Brown Ceas’ its like the 3-Cs Cascade, Columbus, Chinook and its brown! Bittering will hopefully be nice & spicy from the Aramis & Saaz, and I’ll have a Hop-freezer rummage for American Pellets and give it some dry in the fermenter.

The Malts:
First Wort Aramis Hops:
Recirculating the Mash for Clarity:
The Hops all weighed out and ready:
85°c Steep Hops in for 30mins:
Top-Down view of the copper running off to FV, I got 1052 Gravity:
The spent hops in the copper, they soaked up a good couple of litres:

Bit of a late start but all done and dusted, liquored back just short of 3L from 1052 to 1045 getting a 21.92 Litre yield so only 1L short of target volume.
I almost forgot to add the Protafloc ‘cos I was messing about on Twitter too much, extended boil by 5 mins to account for lack of concentration!
I may dry hop this with Cascade Pellets, we shall see… ;-)

*24th Mar ’13 – Dry Hopped with 20g each of Cascade & Amarillo, so approx 2g/litre, Gravity at 1011. I also skimmed the yeast to use in my Robust Wheat Porter.

*Racked to Box 31st Mar ’13 with just 20g White sugar primings, Alkleer Finings also added as this is to be served from Handpull on the bar at work. Smells nicely dry hopped :)

Bravo+Apollo=Citra? – An experimental brewday with added Brew-Monkey! Its something I heard Stan Hieronymus say on a Brewery Network podcast (1H.27mins in) about the Bravo+Apollo=Citra so thought I’d give it a go, so ordered some Bravo to go with the Apollo I already had. If its any good I’ll maybe enter it into the Northern Craft Brewers & Saltaire Brewery Competition.
Thats experiment No.1, experiment No.2 was for SimpleOne on JBK (@Beehaveeor on Twitter) who wanted 5 beers marking for a hopping experiment he’s conducting, this second experiment also involved Dave@broadfordbrewer who came over to eat our food and drink our beer… and most welcome he was too.

The Malts:
Dave Mashing in:
The part of the brewday where we had to be diligent:
Running into the copper:
The 80c Steep hops:

The wort was certainly smelling very good, hope the yeast works its magic and makes it taste like Citra, in any case the Bravo hops were smelling good too, though the Apollo just smell like Dank Onions :)
Did a 2.5 Litre Liquorback to get OG 1055, so less than 1 Litre short on predicted brew length.

*8th Mar ’13 – Gravity at 1020 and tastes rather nice, its definitely not Citra but its certainly good beer ;) Might Dry Hop with a few grams of Bravo & Apollo.

Pacific Rim – Light coloured beer stocks are low so I hope this to be a hoppy easy drinking beer, bittering from Simcoe and very kiwi Flame-out steep, I had a hop-freezer rummage and found a half pack of Riwaka… nice :)
The name ‘Pacific Rim’ is sort of an evolution from my Ring Of Fire which was all New Zealand grown hops, I didn’t realise until afterwards that there is a movie of the same name which looks pretty cool.

The Malts, 1kg of Weyermann Munich I & some CaraGold are my body & sweetness:
The hops:
First Wort Hops, I went with an open pack of Simcoe rather than opening up my first choice, a new pack of Magnum:
100g Flame-out Steep, all these hops were smelling amazing, the Pacific Jade are really sticky too:
Pre-liquorback gravity 1046, target is 1040:

No messing today, added some spacing pieces inside my Mesh Hop-Stopper so that it can’t lay too flat, compact & block, had lovely clear and timely run-off to FV.
Slight Schoolboy error was miss-reading the calculator and liquoring back an extra litre doh! Not the end of the world!
Tucked up in the fermentation fridge at 20°c, the yeast should make fairly short work of this.

*2nd Feb ’13 – This is tasting pleasantly light and drinkable, down at 1008 pretty sure its finished, happy so far :)

*Bottled 5th Feb ’13 with 100g White Sugar.

*12th Feb ’13 – this is very drinkable, subtle orange and berry with some light woody notes, a crisp bitterness and finish. I could easy drink a few of these :)

Non Terrestrial Intelligence – I’m using stuff up and have no Pale or Lager malt so I bought some Oat Husks from TheMaltMiller and added 5% to the recipe to aid sparging with so much Wheat Malt. I’m hoping for a fairly big hit of American hops with a good amount of bitterness.
The name comes from the Abyss movie.

Malts in the bucket, I added some gypsum to the mash and Calcium Chloride & Mag Sulphate to the boil:
Adding the Mash Liquor to the Mash Tun, added a few degrees higher than my strike temperature and allowed to cool / Pre-heat the tun before mashing in:
I was originally going to use Magnum for bittering but decided to go with the open packs of hops instead so it was Simcoe all the way:
The Oat Husks in the mash:
20min Steep of the Flameout hops:
Initial Gravity reading was 1061, liquored back 2.5L to 1054:
The usual go-to yeast, its easy and clean fermenting:

A good brewday, the Oat Husks / Sparge worked really well and the wort was pretty clear for such a high percentage of Wheat Malt. The wort was smelling great too, put to bed in the fermentation fridge set to 20°c.

*7th Dec ’12 – Gravity at 1014 @about 22°c think its done but will give it another day before chilling it down. The Hydrometer sample tasted very nice too :)

*10th Dec ’12 – Down to 1013.5-ish, put on to chill down before bottling, still tasting good :)

*Bottled 16th Dec ’12 – with 100g White Sugar into about 20L of beer, still tastes good, would probably have been epic if I’d dry hopped :)